Wonderworker II

That English invention: The Wonder
Worker in nighttown

U 15.3272-7: Sleep reveals the worst side of everyone, children perhaps
excepted. I know I fell out of bed or rather was pushed. Steel wine is said to
cure snoring. For the rest there is that English invention, pamphlet of which I
received some days ago, incorrectly addressed. It claims to afford a noiseless,
inoffensive vent. (he sighs) ’Twas ever
thus. Frailty, thy name is marriage.

The
demonstrative adjective ‘that’ in Bloom’s self-defence before the Nymph might have
alerted readers to the identity of the apparatus whose usage he advocates. As in
‘Sirens’ and ‘Penelope’—‘That wonderworker if I had’ (11.1224-25); ‘that
wonderworker they sent him’ (18.716)—‘that English invention’ is a pejorative
reference to the same medical device for relieving ills of the fundament.1
The adjectival distancing employed by both Bloom and Molly succeeds in ‘Circe’
to such an extent that an explicit mention of the patent device is pushed out
of the drafts of the nighttown episode entirely. Nowhere in any published
edition of ‘Circe’ is the Wonder Worker so named.

Yet the first
of two drafts of ‘Circe’ now at the National Library of Ireland, MS 36,639/12
(hereafter the Paris copybook), contains the earliest reference to the device known
to survive in the genetic dossier of Ulysses.
The Paris copybook, which dates to the summer of 1920, consists largely of a
revision of the first half of a draft now at Buffalo, MS V.A.19. The latter,
which I have elsewhere labelled the Trieste copybook, is free from all mention
of Bloom’s ‘thaumaturgic remedy’ (17.1825).2
The Paris copybook, however, builds on its parent by featuring the first draft
of Bloom’s exchange with the Nymph; across one-and-a-half rectos and four
versos Joyce develops the scene. Three hundred words sketch its broad contours.
The Nymph appears suddenly, mentions her humble origins in the pages of Photo Bits and her revulsion for the
deeds of ‘the chamber of love’ at 7 Eccles Street. Bloom catalogues those
activities, by turns apologetically, by turns abjectly, but against the Nymph’s
claims of idealized feminine beauty finally ‘starts violently to his feet’ and says,
‘You are no immortal. Begone.’3

In terms of
word count, the Nymph scene triples in size across major interlinear, marginal,
and verso additions and emendations to the Paris copybook. (Among these is the
first mention of ‘La Amora and Karini’, now 15.3247.4)
The verso of Page 21 contains Bloom’s impromptu disquisition on night-time
relief, built up in several layers of content:

Sleep reveals the worst aspect of everybody, children
perhaps excepted. Steel wine is said to cure snoring. For the rest there is
that English invention TheWonderWorker^the pamphlet of which^ which I received some days ^it claimed to
afford a noiseless vent^. (he sighs) <Such> Perhaps ’twas ever thus.
Frailty, thy name is marriage. (Paris copybook, NLI MS 36,639/12, p. [21v])

The word ‘ago’
is missing from the verso, indicative less of a slip in the white heat of
composition so much as faulty transmission. For Joyce crafted Bloom’s speech not
simply out of his head—or at least not immediately so—but from constituent
elements recorded in his notesheets and notebooks. Two of these anterior
fragments survive: ‘B <sleep—all
show worst side of self>’ (BL ‘Circe’ 19:47) and ‘steel wine v snoring’
(BL ‘Nausicaa’ 1:3-4).5
The copybook witness is thus the site of their material combination and
elaboration. Joyce peppered short phrasal additions over the amalgam and
thereby introduced a pleonasm, ‘the pamphlet of which which I received’, not resolved
until the entire passage was fair-copied. The next draft in the sequence of
‘Circe’s’ composition also survives and the clean-up effort is visible in this
document, the loose-leaf Quinn draft now at the National Library of Ireland:

Sleep reveals the worst aspect of everybody, children
perhaps excepted. Steel wine is said to cure snoring. For the rest there is
that English invention TheWonderworkerthe pamphlet of which I received some
days ago ^It claims to afford a noiseless and inoffensive vent^ (he sighs) ’Twas
ever thus. Frailty, thy name is marriage. (Quinn draft, NLI MS 35,958, fol.
[15r])

That the Paris
copybook is the immediate ancestor of the Quinn draft at this juncture is
evident from the recurrence of a verso addition to the former as an interlinear
addition on the latter. While fair-copying the busy Paris copybook verso and
making minor adjustments to its contents, Joyce overlooked the claim of the
Wonder Worker, cast in coy advertisingese, ‘to afford a noiseless vent’. The words
are jotted down on the Paris copybook verso at a slight remove from the main
block of additional text and its satellite insertions, easily overlooked as
they are tucked in beneath a patch of material intended for substantially later
in the scene. Despite a connecting pencil line or ‘shoestring’ (FW 121.08) linking the addition to its
point of insertion, Joyce missed the prompt on his first run-through of the
copybook and was obliged to re-inscribe the advertising claim interlinearily on
the Quinn draft, though not without altering it slightly.

The centre
sheet of the Quinn draft draws on Joyce’s reading in Bits of Fun for 7 August through 9 October 1920.6
The Paris copybook was drafted several weeks earlier, which supplies a broad terminus ad quem of summer 1920 for
Joyce’s first encounter with the Wonder Worker. John Simpson has traced an
advertisement for the product to the London Daily
Express for 4 July 1922 (right). It mentions a ‘booklet’, presumably the
original of Bloom’s pamphlet—or more pointedly his ‘prospectus’ (17.1819)—but in
the absence of the precise source, the issue of where exactly Joyce found his
Wonder Worker is confined to speculation. Pierre-Marc de Biasi terms the
exploration of such archival grey areas ‘hypothetical exogenetics’ after Raymonde
Debray-Genette.7

Equally
uncertain is the manner in which explicit mention of the device fell out of
‘Circe’. Following a process of endogenetic absorption, the Rosenbach
Manuscript version of the passage, drafted towards the end of 1920, resembles
much more closely the first edition text:

Sleep reveals the worst side of everyone, children
perhaps excepted. I know I fell out of bed or rather was pushed. Steel wine is
said to cure snoring. For the rest there is that English invention, pamphlet of
which I received some days ago. It claims to afford a noiseless, inoffensive
vent. (he sighs) ’Twas ever thus. Frailty, thy name is marriage. (Rosenbach Manuscript
‘Circe’, fol. 53)8

The
disappearance of ‘The Wonderworker’ from the episode is unlikely to have been a
mistake or simply oversight, since the device is named in the main text of the
Quinn draft. Rather, and as de Biasi proposes, ‘the exogenetic procedure
contains within itself the principle of its own effacement by writing’.9
The very pith of the newspaper advertisement—the name of the product—which,
once encountered, spurred Joyce to the integration of a real-world particular
into Ulysses, was written out of
‘Circe’ as the graft between foreign body and draft content became
progressively neater. De Biasi writes, ‘As it meshes better and better with its
context, the detail sometimes ends up becoming utterly unrealistic, if it
doesn’t simply run aground’.10
But this erosion is limited to Bloom’s final adventure. Why Joyce wrote the
name out of ‘Circe’ when he would retain it in ‘Ithaca’ and ‘Penelope’, and,
moreover, add it to the typescript of ‘Sirens’, is not clear. But one surprising
context for this genetic ephemera from late 1920 is Ezra Pound, Joyce’s tireless
advocate in his new Paris home.

In September
1916 Joyce wrote to W. B. Yeats, ‘I can never thank you enough for having
brought me into relations with your friend Ezra Pound who is indeed a wonder
worker’.11
Pound must certainly have seemed like a thaumaturge or saintly miracle worker.
By 1916 he had scouted funds and puffed Joyce in the right circles, he had placed
A Portrait of the Artist in the Egoist,and he was log-rolling energetically for Dubliners and Exiles. But
Nathan Halper has argued intriguingly that the epithet took on an altogether
more scatological bent in the latter years of Ulysses’s composition.12
Pound’s asparaginous objections to Bloom at stool in ‘Calypso’ and to the fart
that rounds out ‘Sirens’ are well documented; by way of the Wonder Worker, Joyce
comments obliquely on his helpmeet’s blue-pencilling treatment of the novel for
Little Review serialization.13
Whether through deletions or counselled alterations—‘I dont arsk you to erase’,
‘fahrt yes, but not as climax of chapter’—Pound seemed determined to afford Ulysses an‘inoffensive vent’ (15.3276).14
As Halper notes, significantly Joyce makes his ‘mischievous addition’ to the
typescript of ‘Sirens’.15
But the private joke not only illustrates the seamless weld between exogenetics
and endogenetics; it also shows how a new exogenetic element such as the Wonder
Worker booklet can alloy with previously elaborated endogenetic material.16
One incorrect address for Bloom’s pamphlet, then, is Thoor Ballylee.

The Wonder
Worker is not the only nod to Pound’s squeamishness in the genetic dossier of ‘Circe’.
Building on the addition to the Paris copybook, for the Quinn draft Joyce draws
on the poet’s March 1918 objection to ‘Calypso’:

Section 4. has excellent things in it; but you overdo
the matter. Leave the stool to Geo. Robey. He has been doing ‘down where the
asparagus grows[’], for some time.

I think certain things simply bad
writing, in this section. Bad because you waste the violence. You use a
stronger word than you need, and this is bad art, just as any needless
superlative is bad art.17

In the midst
of Philip Beaufoy’s evidence before the court, a verso addition to Folio 4 of
the Quinn draft has Bloom, who ‘clears his throat, bravely’, say, ‘It is bad
art, not true to life’.18
Subsequently, the allusion would be blunted, though Pound is still discernable,
however ‘indistinctly’, in Bloom’s ‘University of life. Bad art’ familiar from
the published editions (15.840).

Two slight add-ons
made to neighbouring drafts in the late summer and early autumn of 1920 deftly
sketch Pound into ‘Circe’. Both are effaced by the time of the next surviving
document, the Rosenbach Manuscript. If the question of why the Wonder Worker
dropped out of nighttown remains unanswered, there is, nonetheless, a pleasing
symmetry to the fact that just as the foreign editor of the Little Review was nearing the end of his
usefulness to Ulysses he should flare
briefly in the composition of the first episode that would not be serialized.
John Nash argues that Joyce incorporated into his writing ‘variations of
previous, actual responses to his work’.19
This welcome emphasis on the ‘writing of his [Joyce’s] reception’ is repurposed
as a ‘writing of rejection’ in Finn Fordham’s reading of the genetic dossier of
‘Circe’.20
Fordham focuses on the February 1921 Little
Review trial but, several months before that signal moment in the reception
of high modernism, the episode was already alive to and smarting from the
censure of a more well-meaning critique. Ultimately, however, ‘Circe’ would
respond to Pound not by incorporating the letter of his opprobrium but by
integrating the manner of his response—expurgation, erasure—into its wonder workings.

Ronan Crowley

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1 The grammatical reinforcement
was made clear from the opening of Robert Janusko’s ‘That Wonder Worker’(JJON 2), in which he brings together the
three mentions of the device by name in Ulysses.
I am indebted to Bob for the suggestion of writing more fully on the Wonder
Worker’s brief mention in ‘Circe’. Grammatical repetitions aside, that the
pamphlet for the apparatus is ‘incorrectly addressed’ establishes a sharper
resonance with both ‘Penelope’ and ‘Ithaca’ (17.1819-23).

2 For the interrelationships of
the three drafts of ‘Circe’ that precede the Rosenbach Manuscript see my own
‘Fusing the Elements of “Circe”: From Compositional to Textual Repetition’, James Joyce Quarterly 47, iii (Spring 2010):
341-61.

16 Apropos that weld, de Biasi
writes, ‘Logically speaking, there is no such thing as a purely exogenetic
element: every exogenetic fragment bears the primitive seal of endogenetics, and
the opposition of the two concepts is only relative’. ‘What is a Literary
Draft?’, 47.

18For the latter clause
of Bloom’s response Joyce may be incorporating Samuel A. Tannenbaum’s
contribution to the Little Review symposium
on Exiles: ‘Exiles will in all probability prove to be cavaire to the general,
not only because it is open to the obvious criticism that it is not true to
life’. ‘Exiles: A Discussion of James
Joyce’s Plays’, Little Review 5, ix
(January 1919): 23.

19John Nash, James Joyce and the Act of Reception: Reading,
Ireland, Modernism. (Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006),
p.3.